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You wake up this morning.
You’ve got a big game to play – maybe your last as a college player.
The Sweet 16.
But it’s so much more than that. What news will break about you today? What other businesses will offer you millions of dollars? How many thousands of kids wearing your #22 Iowa jersey will be screaming your name, “Caitlin,” begging you for your autograph? How many posters will they make and hold up telling you they idolize you? How many reporters will surround you after the game asking you a million questions?
This Caitlin Clark Craze feels like when the Beatles came to America and started playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to throngs of people screaming – and crying so overcome with excitement — in football stadiums.
Maybe bigger.
It feels like anything could happen today and every day lately for Caitlin Clark, the Iowa superstar basketball player whose popularity has shot to someplace far beyond the moon and is well on its way to Mars.
Yesterday she was invited to play on the U.S. Summer Olympics basketball team – the first time a college player has received such an honor. Two days ago she got offered $5 million to play in a men’s 3-on-3 league – another first.
An avalanche of offers are coming her way – every day. She used to just be a basketball player. Now she’s a national hero, a person we look to for leadership and vision and how to become successful, a beacon of an American ideal and American idea.
What’s next? An initiation to the White House? A bidding war for her to be the lead ad spokesperson for Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple?
This feels out of control. Sometimes it’s hard to explain how a single person gets so big so fast. In some ways it’s understandable. She’s a great basketball player – the greatest scorer of anyone who has played college hoops and that’s historically amazing. Check.
She’s from the Midwest so a charming wholesome story not a less interesting and more jaded media-manipulated churned up product of New York or LA. Check. She’s articulate and doesn’t say things that get her in trouble. Check.
But there’s more causing this national frenzy like we rarely see. It may be timing. We all know this is an election year and that’s going to be ugly. We don’t like to see adults being mean to each other, behaving like were told not to in sixth grade. So we embrace Caitlin’s story because it’s not underhanded and a deathly serious fight for power that makes us all feel dismayed. She’s a relaxing and happy distraction from a corrupt political system, trillions of dollars of national debt, horrible wars, and an Earth that’s getting uncomfortably warm.
It’s ultimately about something more pure, nicer, and simpler than that. A girl shooting an orange ball from 35 feet away and swishing it – consistently. It’s jaw-dropping in its impressiveness. People love seeing a ball make the nylon dance especially from far away. It’s satisfying and mesmerizing. It’s beautiful. Humans gravitate towards beauty because it comforts them, and lifts their moods.
Her almost incomprehensible popularity is also about the rise of women to even higher heights. We’re hearing about women excelling in so many different ways and it’s so true and well deserved. More women are going to college than men. Women rock. Caitlin rocks.
Caitlin Clark crystallizes this reality that women are becoming more skilled, powerful, and amazing, and it’s inspiring to see. She’s showing us how great women are, a concrete reminder, and that makes us feel good. It encourages us.
And yet I believe there are reasons she’s become so huge in the American psyche that are hard to capture in words. Why has she gotten so huge?
It’s not normal for a women’s hoops player to be getting so much attention – much more than any men’s college player. Why? I ask you, why?
I think, honestly, it mostly can be explained by the shooting from long range. Hardly any man can make shots from where she does – not even NBA players.
A woman in college is better at a key skill – in a sport originally played mostly by men — than all college men and just about all men.
Caitlin has broken through a ceiling. She’s destroyed the stereotype that women can’t shoot a basketball as well as men. She has demonstrated skills almost no man possesses in a sport once dominated by men.
But what else? Why is she so fascinating?
I also think it’s about hope.
When we see her excel, we have hope we can excel. We want to be great at what we do, and she shows us it’s attainable.
And worth striving for.
This helps us wake up in the morning with purpose.
And we all need purpose.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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